The sumatran orang lives, obviously, in Sumatra – they are an endemic species. According several genetic analysis the Sumatran and Bornean populations diverged from each other about 1.5-1.7 MYA. They are largely frugivorous and spend most of their time in trees. On the ground they are quadrupedal. Unlike the chimpanzee, bonobo, and gorilla, they are not knuckle walkers they use their fist. Males tend to be solitary.

Connor MacLeod: How do you fight such a savage?
Ramirez: With heart, faith and steel. In the end there can be only one.

Rudolf Raff, in The Shape of Life, has an interesting discussion on attempts to iron out the relationships between lungfish, trout, and humans. On the surface it is quite simple. Lungfish are more closely related to humans than trout are. The lungfish has some adaptations to air breathing and one of the questions raised by the above relationship is whether these adaptations are homologous to those of tetrapods, or are they independent solutions to the same problem.

Enter the coelacanth. Morphological analyses of where the coelacanth fit into the above scheme yielded conflicting results as did various and sundry molecular analyses. One of the keys to solving the problem came in a mitochondrial DNA analysis that indicated a lungfish-tetrapod clade with coelacanths as the next branch and finally ray-finned fish. Assuming this is true, what can the fossil record and morphology tell us? This is where the story gets interesting. According to Raff, the lungfish, the coelacanth, and tetrapods are the few surviving members of a, once, more diverse rhipidistian clade. Early lungfish were deep sea forms that had gills, while modern forms are air breathers. Getting back to the question above, this means that the adaptations to air breathing are convergent with tetrapods. Raff concludes:

An especially striking demonstration of this conclusion is that the earliest know tetrapod, Acanthostega from the upper Devonian of Greenland has been shown by Coates and Clack to have had functional internal gills. It probably also possessed lungs, which were a primitive feature shared by bony fishes. Tetrapods have lost their gills in becoming more terrestrial. The first tetrapods thus convergently resembled modern lungfishes more than they resembled the earliest lungfishes. [page 162 – afarensis]

The molecular data wasn’t wrong, just incomplete due to missing taxa. In this case the taxa were missing due to extinction and this problem also, one thinks, affected the morphological analyses. I suspect that one could achieve the same affect by simply omitting some species from a morphological analysis. The point to take away from this is that in order to untangle the problem, both molecules and morphology were required. Not to mention more data. All to often, morphology and molecular analysis have been presented as being in some kind of zero sum conflict where there can be only one.

I haven’t had a lot of time for reading lately, so I am still in the process of reading the paper. I am just now at the critique of the molecular evidence for a chimp/human clade. Here is a longish quote:

Schwartz and Grehan scrutinized the hundreds of physical characteristics often cited as evidence of evolutionary relationships among humans and other great apes-chimps, gorillas, and orangutans-and selected 63 that could be verified as unique within this group (i.e., they do not appear in other primates). Of these features, the analysis found that humans shared 28 unique physical characteristics with orangutans, compared to only two features with chimpanzees, seven with gorillas, and seven with all three apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans). Gorillas and chimpanzees shared 11 unique characteristics.

Schwartz and Grehan then examined 56 features uniquely shared among modern humans, fossil hominids-ancestral humans such as
Australopithecus-and fossil apes. They found that orangutans shared eight features with early humans and Australopithecus and seven with Australopithecus alone. The occurrence of orangutan features in Australopithecus contradicts the expectation generated by DNA analysis that ancestral humans should have chimpanzee similarities, Schwartz and Grehan write. Chimpanzees and gorillas were found to share only those features found in all great apes.

Schwartz and Grehan pooled humans, orangutans, and the fossil apes into a new group called “dental hominoids,” named for their similarly thick-enameled teeth. They labeled chimpanzees and gorillas as African apes and wrote in Biogeography that although they are a sister group of dental hominoids, “the African apes are not only less closely related to humans than are orangutans, but also less closely related to humans than are many” fossil apes.

The researchers acknowledge, however, that early human and ape fossils are largely found in Africa, whereas modern orangutans are found in Southeast Asia. To account for the separation, they propose that the last common human-orangutan ancestor migrated between Africa, Europe, and Asia at some point that ended at least 12 million to 13 million years ago. Plant fossils suggest that forests once extended from southern Europe, through Central Asia, and into China prior to the formation of the Himalayas, Schwartz and Grehan write, proposing that the ancestral dental hominoid lived and roamed throughout this vast area; as the Earth’s surface and local ecosystems changed, descendant dental hominoids became geographically isolated from one
another.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I would have more to say about primates, brain evolution, and life history. I still plan on exploring that in future posts, but wanted to mention this interesting item that deserves a post of its own.

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"You may not be willing to admit that you resemble an ape; if your thousandth ancestor is more like an ape than you are, you may, if you wish, call it a coincidence. But if that thousandth ancestor's forebears become progressively more simian as you trace back the geneological lines, you will have to admit that somewhere in your family tree there squats an ape." Earnest Hooten

Charles Darwin

"But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian." Charles Darwin: The Autobiography